LaTeX: How to make a fullpage vertical rule on every page? - graphics

I'm using LaTeX and I would like to have vertical rule along left side of page, topmargin to bottommargin, 0.5in from the left edge of the page. I want this on every page, so I assume that means it must somehow be tied to the header or the footer?
I've made no progress at all, so I need help with (1) making the full-length rule itself and (2) making it happen automatically on every page of the document.
Can someone tell me how to do that?

I got a working answer to my question on the Latex Community forum: http://www.latex-community.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=9072&p=34877#p34877
The answer I got uses the 'Background' package and this code:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{background}
\usepackage{lipsum}% just to generate filler text for the example
\SetBgScale{1}
\SetBgAngle{0}
\SetBgColor{black}
\SetBgContents{\rule{.4pt}{\paperheight}}
\SetBgHshift{-9cm}
\begin{document}
\lipsum[1-90]
\end{document}
Works great and was easy to adjust to put one vrule in left margin area and one in the right margin area.

There could be a LaTeX package to do this for you, but I'm more of a TeX person, so I tried to come up with a TeX solution (not always the best idea to mix plain TeX with LaTeX but I think I have it working).
Try this. Box 255 is the box register that TeX places the page contents into before the page is output. What I've done is taken the existing output routine, and changed it to insert into box 255: a 0-height, 0-width infinitely shrinkable-but-overflowing set of boxes containing a rule that is the height of the page, 0.4pt thick and with any luck, half an inch away into the left. The existing contents of box 255 is then added after this rule. Then I call the previous output routine which outputs the page (which now includes a rule), and also the headers and footers.
\newtoks\oldoutput
\oldoutput=\expandafter{\the\output}%
\output{%
\setbox255\vbox to 0pt{%
\hbox to 0pt{%
\vsize\ht255%
\vbox to \ht255{%
\vss
\hbox to -0.5in{%
\hss
\vrule height \ht255 width 0.4pt%
}%
}\hss
}\vss
\box255%
}%
\the\oldoutput
}%
Put it before your \begin{document} command. This might not solve your problem completely, but hopefully it should get you started. Here's a great page for learning about TeX primitives and built-in things.

Have a look at the eso-pic package. From memory, what you want would look like this:
\AddToShipoutPicture{%
\setlength\unitlength{1in}%
\AtPageUpperLeft{%
\put(0.5,\topmargin){\vrule width .5pt height \textheight}%
}%
}
It's not clear in your question if you want the line to span the text area or the whole paper height. Depending on the case, you have to replace \topmargin and \textheight by the correct values, either 0pt or whatever your top margin is, or by \paperheight. See the geometry package if you don't already use it for how to control those dimensions.

Related

How to show whitespace for given scope in a Sublime Text color scheme

Is there any way to set white space visible for a given scope?
I'm working on modifying a color scheme to suite my liking and would like to be able to show spaces within a given scope. I haven't seen anything suggesting it's possible within the color-scheme documentation on Sublime's website.
For my specific case, and I imagine there's other useful cases, I'm working with Markdown and want to highlight a double-space line-break. I'm able to set the background, but this doesn't look quite right. I'm hoping to be able to make whitespace visible for this small scope and change the foreground color to make it stick out.
The short answer to your question is no; or rather, Yes, but only in the way that you've already discovered.
Color schemes can only apply foreground/background colors to scopes as well as bold/italic font weights. So assuming that there is a specific scope detected by the syntax you're using that is used for the things you're trying to highlight, the only thing the color scheme can do is alter the background color to make them visible.
The only thing that can render white space natively is the draw_white_space setting, which at the moment only allows you to turn it off everywhere, turn it on everywhere, or turn it on only for selected text. In this case that doesn't really help.
There are possibilities for something like this in the plugin realm though (these examples can be tested by opening the Sublime console with View > Show Console or Ctrl+` and entering the code in there; they also assume that you're using the default Markdown syntax):
view.add_regions("whitespace", view.find_by_selector("punctuation.definition.hard-line-break.markdown"), "comment", flags=sublime.DRAW_NO_FILL)
This will cause all of the hard line breaks to be outlined as if they were find results; the color is selected by the scope (which is comment here); that would make them visible without making the whole character position have a background color.
view.add_regions("whitespace", view.find_by_selector("punctuation.definition.hard-line-break.markdown"), "comment", "dot", flags=sublime.HIDDEN)
This will add a dot (colored as a comment) in the gutter for lines that end with this scope; you can also combine this with the previous example to outline them and also call attention in the gutter.
style = '<style>.w { color: darkgray; }</style>'
content = '<body id="whitespace">' + style + '<span class="w">··</span></body>'
phantom_set = sublime.PhantomSet(view, "whitespace")
phantoms = [sublime.Phantom(r, content, sublime.LAYOUT_INLINE) for r in view.find_by_selector("punctuation.definition.hard-line-break.markdown")]
phantom_set.update(phantoms)
This uses Sublime's ability to apply inline HTML phantoms into the document in order to inject a small inline sequence of two unicode center dots immediately between the actual whitespace and the text that comes before it. Here the content can be what you like if you can generate the appropriate HTML; we're just applying a color to the text in this example.
A potential downside here is that the characters you see in the inline HTML aren't considered to be part of the document flow; the cursor will skip over them in one chunk, and they're followed by the actual whitespace.
The result of this example looks like this:
Going the plugin route, you'd need an event handler like on_load() to apply these when a file is loaded and on_modified() to re-update them after modifications are made to the buffer. There may or may not be a package that already exists that has implemented this.

How can I draw to an XY position in Emacs?

I wanted to allow the Emacs cursor to move around freely outside of actual text (similar to virtualedit=all in Vim).
"Oh," I thought, "I'll just keep track of a virtual cursor and draw it to the screen myself."
But it turns out the actual native C drawing routines (such as draw_glyphs) seem to refer back to the buffer contents to decide what to draw (I could be wrong though).
My next idea was to make a giant overlay of all spaces so I'd have complete freedom where to put stuff. But an overlay only goes over ranges of actual text, so again, this does not seem to give me what I'm looking for.
Is this a reasonable goal without hacking the C code?
I believe the writeable area of a window is intrinsically limited to the buffer with which it is associated, i.e. you have to draw in an area where buffer content exists.
(One example of this limitation is the impossibility of drawing a vertical guide line in the 80th column to help the user identify long lines; currently the best possible implementation of such a feature is to highlight the "overflow" of each too-long line.)
You can do the same as what artist-mode does without adding spaces to the buffer:
when trying to place the cursor after the end of the line, just use an overlay with an after-string property which adds the spaces in the display without modifying the buffer.
Have a look at "artist-mode" (M-xartist-modeRET) - it allows you to draw in Emacs.
From the function documentation: "Artist lets you draw lines, squares, rectangles and poly-lines, ellipses and circles with your mouse and/or keyboard."
You can look at popup.el from the auto-complete package, which can pop up tooltips and menus and such at any position, including positions outside the contents of the buffer. Maybe that will show you how you can do it.

Prevent figures/listings from being inserted into specific parts of a LaTeX document

I have a part A in a document with some text and listings/figures in between. The figures and listings are positioned using htb.
Following this part A, there is the bibliography. However a couple of figures do not fit and are therefore are offset to another page, which is fine. But: I do want to limit the offset space to part A and not have the figures be placed within the bibliography text. Also, I don't want to force page of float for all figures (hp positioning or something). A page of floats at the end of part A and before the bibliography would be fine.
So my questions is, is there a way to exclude some parts of a LaTex document from being used for positioning floats that did not fit someplace before?
Maybe I'm missing something, but couldn't you just put a \clearpage right before the bibliography? That forces out all floats that haven't found a place yet.

How can I make a custom layout / change header background color … with Tex, Latex, ConTeXt?

currently I produce dynamically this document with Python Report Labs… to produce pdf documents.
Now, I would like try to produce this document with Tex / Latex / ConTeXt…
I've some questions :
how can I make the layout ?
how can I make header background color ?
how can I define my custom title (with blue box) ?
what is the better choice for my project : Latex or ConTeXt ?
What package I need to use ?
geometry ?
fancyhdr ?
Have you some example ? some resource ?
Yesterday, I've read many many documentation… and I don't found a solution / example for my questions.
Some useful packages apart from the fancyhdr you already mentioned are:
titlesec for more control over your section titles
booktabs for more control over table layout
PGF/TikZ for the graphics in your document, i.e., the page turn effect in the corner and maybe the blue boxes (although that might be considered a bit overkill :))
memoir for more control over your document layout, but the package is more book-oriented than you need probably
koma-script might be a good alternative for memoir but I'm not familiar with it so I don't know about its weaknesses
This is list is not exhaustive and I am not experienced enough in this kind of typesetting meets lay-out stuff to be of much help, but these are packages that come to my mind given your problem :).
Using inputenc there shouldn't be a problem typesetting Russian text.
Maybe the actual process will be easier in ConTeXt, it is more oriented towards control over your typesetting but I'm not familiar with it.
Good luck!
I'd certainly do this kind of think in Context rather than Latex: Context permits grid layout, and allows you to define layers for putting text and other graphics on top of background graphics. But as Pieter says, you could try using TikZ to do this with Latex.
Unicode is no barrier to regular Latex or Context: with either, just specify that you want to use utf-8 as input encoding.
If you do use Latex, don't have headers or footers, and allocate no vertical space for them either.
With Context:
how can I make the layout? — Use grid layout.
how can I make header background color? — Use \setupbackground
how can I define my custom title (with blue box) ? — I don't understand what you want to do here.
Everything you need to do this, except grid mode and how to put graphics in the background, is documented in Context an excursion. Grid mode is explained in the Context manual. Layers are a bit tricky to get to grips with, but Layers in the Context wiki is a good place to start.
With titlesec and color packages use this in LaTeX head (before \begin{document})
\usepackage{titlesec}
\usepackage{color}
% Colors
\definecolor{textcolor}{rgb}{.90,.95,1}
\definecolor{boxcolor}{rgb}{.94,.97,1}
% Header style
\titleformat{\section}
{\color{textcolor}\normalfont\Large\bfseries}
{}{1em}{{\color{boxcolor}\rule{0.35cm}{0.35cm}}\quad}
to make the blue box and change header color, font and remove numbering.

How to put a figure on the top of a page on its own in latex?

One of the figures appear in the middle of a page (on its own) when the figure does not fit the other text. How to show it on top of the new page?
If all else fails, just add \vspace*{3in} to the bottom of your figure below the \caption. Then by trial and error change the 3in dimension until you get the look you want. This is of course pure brute force, but sometimes that's a lot easier than trying to get LaTeX to do things the "right" way.
When in doubt, use brute force.
--- Ken Thompson
I think I misunderstood your question. Are you asking "how do I get floats on pages by themselves to be at the top of the page, rather than vertically centred?"?.
If so, here's how to customise the float page. From source2e, glue is inserted at the top and bottom of the page, and between each float on the page. This inserted glue is given by the following parameters:
\setlength\#fptop{0\p# \#plus 1fil}
\setlength\#fpsep{8\p# \#plus 2fil}
\setlength\#fpbot{0\p# \#plus 1fil}
Simply redefine these to get the output you like. For example, for top- and bottom- aligned floats: (untested)
\makeatletter
\setlength\#fptop{0pt}
\setlength\#fpsep{8pt plus 1fil}
\setlength\#fpbot{0pt}
\makeatother
You can insert a pagebreak via \clearpage or \newpage, then use the t option on the figure environment:
...
\clearpage
\begin{figure}[t!]
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=.75]{graphic/...}
\caption{}
\label{fig:}
\end{figure}
...
If there's nowhere for the figure to fit then it will go on a page by itself. See the FAQ answer on floats for more information on how to customise this behaviour.

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